


lost inside this sanity of mine

by kaneklutz



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Childhood Memories, Communication, Conversations, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Hong Kong Melanie King, Hurt/Comfort, No beta we die like archival assistants, The Slaughter, Trauma, melanie fucks up a bathroom, this isn't important to the story THAT much but fuck you, wtgfs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:54:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27619349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaneklutz/pseuds/kaneklutz
Summary: There is a fire building in her; a feral song spills from her throat and calls for pain, for violence. It roars for carnage, and she is dying of thirst, howling with fury. She needs to inflict pain, pain that is humming in her veins and searing her blood, upon the world.-Waiting for the day these thoughts will go awayKnowing forever I'm alive
Relationships: Georgie Barker/Melanie King
Comments: 4
Kudos: 29





	lost inside this sanity of mine

**Author's Note:**

> the wlw deserve so much more than they get. hats off to y'all i'm sorry you don't get as much content as you deserve.

She doesn’t remember making it back to Georgie’s flat, much less remember why she thought it was a good idea to go there, of all places. They’ve spent a fair amount of time together, and Melanie has been told, multiple times, that she is welcome, but Georgie’s flat is still _Georgie’s_ , in the same way that Melanie’s flat is Melanie’s. 

She is still an intruder at worse, a guest at best, no matter what Georgie says. 

The door falls when she slams her entire body against it, wrenching the hinges apart with some force deep inside of her. A strength she’d always wanted, but not one that was entirely natural for someone of her small stature. Distantly, a foggy corner of her mind says, quietly, that it’s a miracle Georgie’s neighbours, a deaf old couple with an adorable little terrier, didn’t see her through the window. 

Now she’s in the bathroom, hands clutching the sides of the sink basin, shaking as she pants heavily. A thousand emotions course through her and coalesce into one defined, unending stream, and she _aches_ to let it out. 

There is a fire building in her; a feral song spills from her throat and calls for pain, for violence. It roars for carnage, and she is dying of thirst, howling with fury. She needs to inflict pain, pain that is humming in her veins and searing her blood, upon the world. 

Distantly, as if through layers and layers of half-forgotten memories tainted by bloodlust, she hears the Admiral scratching on the locked door. Claws rake against the wooden door, into grooves long ago formed, and her fingers twitch in time with each swipe. Rationality had taken charge in the split second after she’d slammed it, and her shaking hands had found the lock, turned it quickly. 

It isn’t out of a sense of concern, or a responsibility for the Admiral’s wellbeing. Simply, Melanie is just _scared._ Through the cloud of rage, she is scared, absolutely terrified, of what she’s becoming. 

(What the angry little girl who picked fights and stood up for anyone who needed her help, stood up for justice, has become.)

(What the young woman who had snapped and spat and argued at every occasion for what she believed in has become.)

Anger, for so long, has been something for her to fall back on, not who she is. Melanie is more than this rage, more than the humming sound of _rip, tear, bleed, pain, hurt_ that echoes through her head, sweeps through her veins. 

At least, it hadn’t been who she was before. Now, it’s becoming harder to tell. 

Melanie squeezes the sink one last time, a last attempt to get herself under control, to stop before the call to war takes over. 

There is a song in her head. 

A voice that calls for death and destruction, calls for her to bring the world to its knees. 

It is loud, and ceaseless, an old, familiar tune that she’s carried with her for so long, coming to light at last, with this new birth. 

As the song reaches a crescendo, and with a last, painful exhale, she lets go.

The slaughter is mindless.

There is nothing but the clean purity of destruction. She tears and rips, her hands acting as deadly tools of chaos and injury, sending everything in this small prison crashing to the ground. This is the furthest thing from methodical; this is unadulterated mayhem, the draw of destruction and pain that sweeps through the world and leaves nothing but fire and ashes in its wake. She drinks in the sound of utter annihilation, and it is the first thing that has satiated her in years. 

As bottles shatter and mirrors crack, her mind drifts, almost calm, almost satisfied by the gluttonous violence. 

As a child, she had been angry. Never violent without intent, but she was filled with a righteous indignation at how poorly some people in the world were treated, how poorly she was treated. Her parents had done their best to train it out of her. It wasn’t right, wasn’t proper, how she’d scream and shout. Serenity was useful in its own way, the ability to remain calm and collected a skill that she’d never quite been able to obtain, but it had never felt right. 

So she’d acted out, time and again. First to argue, first to hit, first to pick a fight. She’d never taken any sort of real self defence class, much less martial arts, but a girl she’d dated once when she was younger, full of teenage stubbornness and indignation, taught her a few moves. The rest of her ability to fend for herself had come with the rage she kept bottled up, a furious source of energy she held within her that she’d been told to never release. 

Melanie remembers the first time she’d punched someone.

She remembers her first fight. 

Bloody affairs, dirty shots at knees and ankles. 

Scrappy and quick, rolling in the dust and dirt, spitting like wild beasts. 

How satisfying it had been, back then, to see the blood on the other girl, how she could feel the energy rippling in waves all around them. 

She also remembers when she’s forced herself to hold back. All the moments after the times she’d let go. Days, weeks, months, spent play-acting the lady, forcing herself into meekness. The shame of not proving her point, of submitting, the guilt and regret and the gnawing, aching shame. 

But no more. At last, that barrier of self doubt, of holding back, of foolish, cowardly restraint is gone, and it feels so agonizingly good to give in. 

_Crash._

Liquids and creams spill from broken bottles and jars, smearing across the tiled floor.

_Rip._

The shower curtain tears between her hands and teeth, ribbons of plastic fabric falling to her feet. 

_Smash._

She cannot feel the pain under the euphoria of power at last, her power, and the mirror breaks, and breaks, and shatters into pieces under her bleeding fists. There is nothing left but the aftermath of her wrath, nothing but her small frame reflected in the fractals of the shattered mirror, shaking and panting and finally free. 

Pain blooms in her hands, across her body in the places where she’d hurled herself at the doors and walls, and that feels good too. The shock of sharp agony and a dull, thrumming ache under her skin, all of her own creation. 

Then footsteps from the hall register through the roaring in her head. 

“Who’s there?”

Like a jolt of lightning, all the fight goes out of her at the sound of Georgie’s voice.

_Fuck._

She sags to the ground, surrounded by carnage, destruction, and an absolute mess of a bathroom. Fuck. Shit. Fucking hell, what had she done? Georgie’s going to be absolutely furious, she’ll hate her and for good reason, because what kind of girlfriend, what kind of person, breaks into someone’s flat and wreaks havoc on their bathroom? 

A monster. A monster does that. 

(Get out. Get out, Melanie, fix this, do something, oh god, oh fuck, please, please, please, _fuck-_ )

“Who’s there? I have a baseball bat, and I am absolutely not afraid to use it. Melanie, if that’s you, I want an explanation for whatever the fuck happened to the door.” 

Her voice is getting closer. 

“Don’t- don’t come in,” Melanie says, her voice cracking as she tries to call out to her-

Her girlfriend? Fuck, not anymore. Her friend? That’s up in the air too. She is so, so fucked. 

The footsteps stop just outside the bathroom door. “Is something wrong?” Georgie calls back. “Are you okay?” 

Melanie lets out a weak sort of giggle at that, because no, the answer is so obviously no that the question itself is ludicrous to hear. 

“No, just don’t- don’t come in, Georgie.” 

“Is something wrong?” she repeats, and Melanie wants to sob, because even when her door is hanging off its hinges, when she’s being stupid and obtuse and cryptic, Georgie still _cares_. She won’t give a damn about Melanie after this, but for now, it’s all she can do to bathe in the last dregs of attention and love. 

The doorknob turns and slowly, cautiously, the door swings open, colliding with cracked bottles and the various products, medicinal and cosmetic, scattered all over the floor. 

“Melanie?”

To Georgie’s credit, she doesn’t scream, or demand that Melanie get the hell out of her flat, or even react in any immediate way. 

Some part of Melanie’s mind that hasn’t gotten the message that this is a serious issue wants to congratulate her for being the calmest person she’d ever met. It’s not appropriate, but when have her thoughts ever been?

Georgie stands in the doorway, dressed in cargo pants, a cropped jacket, and old dyed tank top, looking unfairly gorgeous. The purple headband Melanie gifted her holds back dark curls, streaked with bright white strands that Melanie loves to pick out whenever they lie on the sofa together, absentmindedly petting at each other. 

Melanie never did find out why she had those streaks. Never would now. 

“I’m sorry,” she says dully. It’s all she can bring herself to say, even though she knows how worthless those words truly are. “I’ll clean up and then I’ll go. If you could get me a bin or something, that would be fantastic. A broom too, maybe.” 

What else is there to do but give up?

She watches as Georgie’s face flickers through several emotions, some identifiable but others completely incomprehensible. Then, she bends down to squat in front of Melanie, pushing aside shards of glass. 

“Darling, your hands,” she says softly, and Melanie wants to melt at the kindness in her tone. Why couldn’t she just let Melanie clean up and then leave? It hurts, so much, this kindness that she knows she doesn’t deserve. 

“Come outside, I don’t keep my first aid kit in here. We’ve got to get the glass out of you and those cuts bandaged up, alright? And then we can- we can talk about this.” 

Her words are impressively smooth, with only the smallest stumble. Georgie’s always been an eloquent speaker. Making a podcast suits her, whereas Melanie’s voice-overs in her videos had always been clipped together through a series of imperfect takes. 

But her words can’t be genuine. No one’s that nice, and if they are, it’s never to Melanie. 

“I’m sorry, I know, I’ll leave, I-“ Melanie babbles out before she can fully process Georgie’s words. “Wait- what? What do you mean-“

“There’s pieces of glass stuck all over your hand, Mel, that’s got to hurt.” 

Melanie looks down at her hands. They are bloody, shaking, and sparks of pain have finally started to register through the dull haze of fog that had flooded her.

“But- your bathroom,” she protests softly. 

“We can fix that after, you can help me clean up. Right now, I’m just worried you, Melanie. Please, just come outside and we can talk and clean your hands up. I need- I can’t just let this be another thing I never get an answer for.” 

And she says it so earnestly, so heartbreakingly, that Melanie is powerless to say no. She looks down at her bloody hands, then at Georgie, kneeling carefully in front of her. 

“Alright,” she says softly.

She reaches out her hand and Georgie stands up, grabs her wrist and hoists her up onto wobbly legs. 

“Careful of the glass, your feet are bare,” she says as they make their way out of the bathroom and to the little kitchenette. Melanie is steered over to the table and told to sit down. Blankly, she watches Georgie rummage around under the sink for the first aid kit, and dart into the washroom to return with a pair of tweezers. 

They sit across from each other as Georgie gently washes the blood off Melanie’s hands, picks out shards of broken glass with bright blue tweezers, ones that were likely meant for eyebrows and not medical use. 

“Now,” Georgie says, after the blood is mostly gone, with only a few drying flecks remaining, and Melanie’s hands have been bandaged carefully. “Talk to me.” 

Melanie can feel herself shaking, imperceptible little shivers wracking up and down her body as she stares at the off-white bandages wrapped all around her fingers and palms. Like she’d been plunged into an icy lake, the thin sheet of ice that she’d stood on cracking, shattering, falling away as she plummeted. 

“I don’t know,” she says quietly. It’s not entirely false, but Georgie shakes her head. 

“That’s not good enough, Melanie. You can’t just- smash up a bathroom, and then say you don’t know why you did it. We can’t do anything about this, _I_ can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s happening. I need to understand.” 

Melanie nods automatically, because she doesn’t know what else to respond with. “I don’t- I’m sorry,” she tries, and Georgie wrinkles her nose. 

“Not that either. I don’t care about apologies, I care about change, so if you don’t wreck my eyeshadow palettes again we’re good, but this isn’t just about that. It’s not one of those things where you can just say “I’ll do better” and we never talk about it again.” 

“Okay,” Melanie whispers, and Georgie reaches out to brush a strand of hair away from her face. 

“Start from the beginning, okay? And if…” she trails off, pursing her lips. A crinkle forms between her eyebrows as she deliberates on what to say, and Melanie waits. 

“If you can’t talk about this right now,” she says at last, deliberately and slowly, “that’s okay. I can’t, like, force you to talk about this, but if you care about me, about us-“ she breaks off again, looking frustrated. It’s not often Georgie struggles with phrasing. She’s always been blunt, but somehow still kind, whereas Melanie had never quite managed to walk that line. 

“Sorry, this isn’t easy for me either, I just really don’t want to press you.”

“It’s okay,” Melanie says, because of course it is, it’s Georgie, and she’s beautiful and amazing and the best person Melanie’s ever had the fortune of being allowed to love. She doesn’t deserve this broken mess that Melanie’s become over the past two years.

“Right,” Georgie says, taking a deep breath. “Here’s what I need from you, Mel. If you want to stay together, I will need you to explain, because this is a situation I can’t comfortably let go. If you want to go, that’s okay. I won’t make you explain or stay, and I’ll still be here for you as a friend, but I can’t be with you. Not like we are right now.”

“I want- I want to stay,” Melanie says immediately, and then softer: “I didn’t think you’d give me that choice.” 

Georgie nods determinedly. “Alright. I care about you, and I want you to stay as well, which is why I”m giving you the choice. But like I said six times because I repeat myself a lot,” she says lightly, “I can’t do this without some sort of explanation.”

* * *

She does her best to explain. 

About the bullet in her leg that isn’t really there, about Elias and the archives, how she’s trapped, how she might never get out. About Jon, and all the shit that’s been happening to her for the past month. The anger that’s taken over her life in a much deeper way than she’d ever been able to handle. Rage, enveloping her in its too-hot embrace, covering her like a suit of burning armour. 

She tells Georgie about Sarah Baldwin, about the night that led to her carefully built career crashing down around her. The slow, insidious slide into paranoia and never-ending suspicion of those she’d once trusted the most. A whole new world she’d never bargained for when she became a ghost hunter for the internet. Everything spills from her lips, and it feels almost as good and clean as punching the mirror. 

It’s still a long and halting tale, and she stumbles over her words, goes back on sentences multiple times, stutters her way through the difficult bits, and dips into the near-inaudible register when she talks about what Elias said and did, but eventually it’s over, and she falls silent. Her words hang heavy in the air, but she feels a little lighter. 

Georgie sits and listens through it all, nodding on occasion but remaining silent through the whole speech. She appreciates it, Melanie thinks to herself, that Georgie kept quiet. Continuing after an interruption would’ve been impossible. 

“That was almost like a statement,” she remarks when Melanie finishes. 

She grimaces. “Don’t talk about those right now, they’re awful. I gave Jon mine twice already.” 

“I gave him one too,” Georgie says, “about something that happened to me when I was younger. Just before him and I first met, actually.”

Melanie wants to ask, but it doesn’t feel right, not now. Maybe someday. She hopes Georgie will trust her enough to say. 

“Oh,” is all she musters up. 

“Oh,” Georgie echoes in agreement. 

They sit in silence for a moment, but it doesn’t suffocate them. It just settles over them, like a thin veil. Noticeably present, but not unbearably heavy. Melanie stares down at her hands, watching blood bloom agonizingly slow across the surface of her bandages. 

At last, Georgie stands up, her chair scrapping back loudly. “Alright. Ready to come help clean up the mess?”

Melanie’s secretly grateful that she didn’t call it “her mess,” even though it absolutely is, because that would’ve hurt just a little more than she was able to handle. 

“By the way,” Georgie adds as they walk to the bathroom together, “what happened to my door?” 

Melanie’s face colours, a pink flush spreading across her cheeks. “That was me as well,” she admits. “Sorry, I’ll pay for someone to come fix it sometime, I don’t think I can really do it myself.” 

“No, no, it’s alright, I can get a friend to come by for that hopefully soon, I just don’t think my landlord will be very happy if he notices it.” 

“Oh, god, sorry, I didn’t think. I’m so sorry,” Melanie says frantically, all the pain and anxiety bubbling up in her chest again-

“No need to apologize, really, it’s fine. Well, it’s not,” she amends after seeing the stricken look on Melanie’s face. “But we can fix it. That’s all that matters.”

The bathroom is small and cramped, and barely fits the two of them. They manage somehow though, squeezing around each other as they begin to clear up the mess. They sweep shards of mirror, glass, and plastic into a dustpan, mop at the floor, wipe up spilled creams and ointments. The mirror is beyond repair, so they remove the rest of the shards. Georgie can go without a mirror, and she jokes lightly, saying that it’ll do wonders for her self image. A replacement can be ordered. 

Cleaning takes a while. Much longer than it had taken to ruin it, Melanie muses as the bandages tug against the edges of her wounds and she winces. There’s a metaphor there, about trauma and healing. It only takes one disaster to ruin something, and years to fix all the hurt that was birthed by what to another person could’ve been so small and insignificant. 

Eventually though, they do finish, and the last of the debris is poured into the garbage. They leave to go look at the door, and figure out that they can just pop it back on its hinges. This is accomplished eventually, though at a rather slow pace between Georgie, who’s tall but not the strongest, and Melanie, who is both short and sporting two mildly injured hands. 

They make their way back to the kitchen table together, and this time Georgie drags a chair over to sit beside Melanie. Side by side, Melanie leans into Georgie’s side, absorbing her warmth and the tingly comfort that comes with it. Georgie smells like cinnamon, like spices and warmth and the chilli flavoured cocoa her father made in the winters when she was a little girl. Pressing closer, Melanie basks in her warmth. 

“How can I help you?” Georgie asks at last, quietly. Her hands are running lightly through Melanie’s short, spiky hair, and Melanie shivers lightly as fingernails rake across her scalp. 

She looks up at Georgie, not knowing how to respond as a million thoughts race through her head. Telling her to push away, to break down, to beg for help, to refuse. 

“You don’t need to,” she settles on tentatively. Because it’s the truth, after all. Georgie doesn’t need to help her. It’s not her obligation to do so. Melanie will be fine like this, if she’s alone, if Georgie leaves. It will hurt, but she’s strong, and she can be on her own. Maybe. 

“I don’t,” Georgie agrees, and it hurts for a second, far more than Melanie had expected, before she continues. “But I want to, because I love you, and I’m not good at just sitting around and doing nothing when people I care about are hurting. I can’t just watch you fall further into- into whatever this is, and not help, I can’t watch another person dig their own grave, Melanie.”

She nods, because that’s fair and reasonable, and because she’s never been one to sit idly while her friends were in need of help either. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t need you to be sorry,” Georgie reminds her. “I just need you to tell me how to help you. And if you want me to leave, I’ll leave. If you want me to stop pushing, I’ll stop pushing, just say the word.”

She lets the words float in the air between them before she continues. “But that means I leave, Melanie. That means this ends. And I don’t want this to end, Mel, I _don’t,_ but I can’t sit here pretending everything’s fine when you aren’t fine, when I’m watching you run yourself into the ground.”

“Okay.”

What else is there to say? She’s suddenly so tired. 

Georgie nods, more firmly and decisively than before. “So you’ll go to therapy?”

She hadn’t expected that. “Huh?”

“Therapy. I know a few people who can give recommendations, get you off the waitlist and into the office faster, and if those people don’t work out I’ll help you find someone else.” 

“What makes you think _therapy_ will help?” Melanie spits out defensively, feeling the ever familiar hum in her blood that she fights to tamper down. It’s not Georgie’s fault. Just all those years she’d spent being told that her anger was unjustified, irrational, that she was sick and needed a doctor, years and years of being told to “get help” when she was just sticking up for herself. 

“What makes you even think a doctor will fix this? It’s a _ghost bullet wound_ in my leg, Georgie, and a creepy fucking boss that likes to slurp memories out of my head, how is a therapist supposed to deal with that?”

“Melanie. Calm down,” Georgie responds. She waits for a few minutes, while Melanie struggles to not storm out or curse or do something rash that she will inevitably regret. 

“I’m not saying that it’ll fix everything, alright?”

She takes Melanie’s wrists carefully in her hands, maneuvering around her bloody, bandaged hands. “I’m not saying that it’ll fix everything,” she repeats. “I only know, from my own experience and other people’s, that sometimes it can help a lot more than you think. To be completely clear, therapy doesn’t help everyone, and if it doesn’t help you, then that’s alright. But you have to _try_ it first, before you can know, right? You’ve always been a fan of trying things. Anything once, and all that.”

“Right. Yeah,” Melanie says, squeezing her fists lightly in an attempt to check herself. “And if it doesn’t help? What then?”

“All we can do is do what we can,” Georgie says with a shrug and that familiar half smile of hers, painfully gorgeous no matter what situation. Melanie couldn’t help feeling that twinge in her heart. 

“We do what we can,” Georgie continues, “because it’s better than doing nothing at all.”

They sit with that for a moment, Georgie’s thumbs rubbing gentle circles into the surface of Melanie’s skin while she blinks back tears. Georgie isn’t leaving her. Georgie isn’t going to leave her, if she does something to fix herself, if she _tries_ to get better. 

“We do what we can?” Melanie says at last. 

With a growing smile, Georgie nods. “We do what we can.”

“Alright,” Melanie says. “Will you? Help me, that is.”

Georgie’s hands fall from her wrist to cup her cheek tenderly. “Of course, darling. I promise I’ll be here with you, every step of the way.” 

Melanie lets herself fall into Georgie’s arms. It’s a sweet vulnerability, this, and she treasures it with every beat of her war-starved heart. 

“Thank you,” she whispers into the curve of Georgie’s neck, into her hair that smells like cedar and smoke. “Thank you. I love you.” 

“I love you too,” Georgie whispers back. 

They stay together for a while. It’s enough, perhaps, to just be like this.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! i've been wanting to write something for these two for so long, and i don't know if i like this but it's something. trying to manifest wtgf back into my life,,,i miss them,, 
> 
> i'm @/loverdontleave on tumblr if you wanna say hi
> 
> lyrics and title from Doctor by Truslow! give them a listen :)


End file.
